There is. There is banning and shadowbanning, which includes mechanisms where whatever stories someone posts are "dead" on arrival. HN has robust mechanisms against spam. Re "manipulation" I'd think one person's manipulation is another person's posting interesting stories, but as was said, if someone's submissions get flagged enough, it will get attention and their posts will be killed if deemed spam. Overall I think it's more common just to see posts that people disagree with or read into versus actual "manipulation".
Also, the concept of manipulation is very insulting to the readership. Maybe it's sometimes warranted, but on HN of all places, I think people can debate, judge, and flag on their own if they think something is being manipulative.
The suspicion of manipulation is based on years of evidence of "troll farms" and other social media campaigns. To think that HN is immune is naive.
If arguably the smartest tech group on the internet cannot devise a defense, then we're more doomed than I thought. After all, at the opposite end of the spectrum we have "AI" at Google and other companies banning users based on incomprehensible algorithms. Surely there's a path between the extremes.
Consider for a moment how little it would cost to pay people to post on HN. Other HN readers don't even need to see it; it just needs to get indexed by search engines. That adds the weight of HN to the content which it is linking to as far as the search engines are concerned. They probably aren't measuring HN reader votes.
So the question is, should we allow HN to be used as a lever to promote anything that a financially-backed group wants to promote? Or can we devise ways to reduce or eliminate this?
I didn't know about AWS IQ. That could be useful, but that is likely targeting more lengthy engagements (1 week and beyond). I was thinking of shorter term, such as hours or few days.
As for how much to pay, it would depend on the problem and the buyer. In my case, since my need is semi-hobby, I would pay $200 or less for someone who could answer my question. The challenge is finding someone who actually knows the problem and scenario. For that magical person, they can probably spend 15 minutes and earn $200. Someone who doesn't immediately recognize the problem will spend more time, and then it will obviously be worth less to them.
So the challenge is in identifying the need and providing the matchmaking. Especially for the HN crowd, we are likely to have exhausted the obvious web search solutions already; so we need someone who really knows the narrow domain. Like in my case, I know there are probably 20-100 people in the world who have setup a pihole with cloudflared succesfully. The trick is finding them :).
Personally, I'd have a hard time accepting this sort of offering. What if your setup is more complex than what you're describing? What if you don't accept my solution? I might end up embarking in a stressful multi hour / day rabbit hole for a fixed price.
More generally, I wouldn't be keen at accepting to support random internet strangers whose environment and reputation I know little about.
I think the real challenge is finding the right set of incentives for both parties* to accept the risks for this
type of service.
*Likewise, you would be risking being played by a random internet conman
These would typically be short, time-boxed engagements (like one or two hours or less).
For example, some years ago I was trying to setup a Stellar (cryptocurrency) node, but I was having some problems with configuration. I asked on the Stellar slack or discord group and found someone who was willing to help. We negotiated $100/hr, and then we arranged a time to meet online. In the end, I paid for 1.5 hours of time, and it was well worth it. If he had solved my problem in 5 minutes, I would have still paid for a minimum 1 hour; win-win.
It seems like there could be a matchmaking service to facilitate exchanges like this. It's a bit like how you can go to stackoverflow, and if you happen to see a question you know the answer to but which has no answers, you may choose to take 5 minutes (for free!) and answer it.
In this case, however, requests would expire after a specified time. Solution providers could setup notifications for certain topics so they know when there's a need for their expertise.
The article has links for "power lines" (twice!), "wind" turbines, and "birds".
Despite mentioning the vulnerability maps, it does not link to such a map. It does not even link to the study or paper. I imagine many people would be interested in those significant details.
Apparently, it's Hotspots in the grid: Avian sensitivity and vulnerability to collision risk from energy infrastructure interactions in Europe and North Africa (https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365...). It's fortunately open-access and it indeed has some low-resolution maps but I haven't seen a higher-resolution version (it's not vector even in the PDF version).
electrical power lines are "critical infrastructure" status in most countries; fifteen percent of countries worldwide do not publish official maps at all.. every country has protected information and publishing restrictions related to self-defense.
The point was that this article had useless links in the article which were not pertinent to the specific topic, and it mentioned a map from a study, but it did not show or link to the map (or the study!).
Other commenters replied to me and linked to the study, which does have a low-res but useful map. That is all I wanted, and it should have been linked in the original article.
GoPro has been performing relative miracles for years. Their products are well worth the money for the benefits they provide -- if you have a reason to use them.
I've watched a lot of youtube videos, some of which were shot with quite expensive gear. And honestly, the ones shot with a gopro set on wide (not ultra-wide) provide reliably great video in so many conditions, and very importantly without tearing or other weird artefacts which a lot of phones introduce.
Honestly, I'd like a 4th camera in the iPhone which is a GoPro...
I have recently built a dev server for myself using https://github.com/coder/code-server (VS Code in the browser, hosted on the remote server). With very little effort, you get an always-on dev environment with built in terminal so you don't even have to ssh in if you don't feel like it (if you're happy working within the editor's terminal window pane).
As a bonus, I also setup openvnc, cloudflared (DNS over HTTPS), and pihole. And tmux and mosh of course.
With this setup I can even do my work from an iPad (once you get the VPN setup correctly).
It's nice to be able to reboot my laptop without losing my place in my work.
The linked page says little about how they do what they do. Even the Design page doesn’t explain how.
This all appears to assume some knowledge of power generation or even their approach.
Edit >> sorry! I read the hn linked page, and then I navigated to the design page. I did not also go to “home”. Perhaps the hn link could be for the home page.
The actual home page says: "ThorCon is a molten salt fission reactor. Unlike all current nuclear reactors, the fuel is in liquid form. It can be moved around with a pump and passively drained. This 500 MW fission power plant is encapsulated in a hull, built in a shipyard, towed to a shallow water site, ballasted to the seabed." and "ThorCon is a straightforward scale-up of the successful United States Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE)."
It's nuclear power based on Thorium instead of Uranium
The tale goes that DoD was researching both options during the Cold War? and eventually shut down the Thorium research due to the warfare potential of enriched uranium
It's becoming more popular last 10 years or so, with books being written about it and private companies picking up the development of the technology
What is ThorCon? ThorCon is a molten salt fission reactor. Unlike all current nuclear reactors, the fuel is in liquid form. It can be moved around with a pump and passively drained. This 500 MW fission power plant is encapsulated in a hull, built in a shipyard, towed to a shallow water site, ballasted to the seabed.
As with any promising new idea for energy production, we'll see what the actual costs are once (if) it enters commercial production. Many concepts that work perfectly in the lab fail to succeed industrially.
The visuals were excellent, but the gameplay and game design were imo what made the game special.
I played it new. I really felt the sense of tension and attention to detail of being stealthy, and the corresponding consequences of failing to be stealthy.
It sounds in several places in the article like he has a severe case of impostor syndrome.
Fortunately (spoiler) at the end of the article, after his time at the MIT research lab, he sees that some traditionally super smart people value him and see him as intellectually special.
Yes, I think he has a bit executive dysfunction -- a bit unable to set and follow up on long term goals.
That'd make it hard for him to join a uni or find ways to make use of his abilities.
I wonder if he'd be more happy, working as a language teacher assistant (why assistant? see the 1st sentence above), for all languages they teach at some university nearby :-)
What was obvious to me was the frequency of submissions of the account, and additionally nature of the topics.
Simplistically, I would question the need for any HN user to submit more than one or two entries per day. People who submit 10+ are probably suspect.